Silver Linings Playbook

Silver Linings Playbook - Matthew Quick

Pat Peoples believes in silver linings, and he is waiting for the movie of his life to come to its happy ending. Despite spending the past few years in "the bad place" with no memory of what happened to put him there, he believes he will be happily reunited with his wife if only he can prove that he is now a better person. To prove he is a better person, he spends all day working out, all night reading, and puts all his effort into being kind instead of being right. With the support of his friends and family, he manages to make a smooth transition out of “the bad place,” but his encounters with Tiffany, the sister of a friend, only confuse him. While Pat focuses all his efforts on reuniting with his ex-wife, Tiffany silently challenges all his notions of how the world works. She pushes him out of his comfort zone, provokes him into emotional outbursts (occasionally showing her own dark side), and supports him through his all-too-familiar struggles to function in daily life. As Pat strives tirelessly for his prized “silver lining,” he learns that silver linings, if they exist at all, may not be permanent, cannot be pre-determined, and are beyond personal control.

“Silver Linings Playbook” documents the struggles of an emotionally unstable man trying to live a normal life. He is alternately strong and fragile, his emotional balance delicately dangling between unflagging optimism and uncontrollable rage. In a world of uncertainty, the only routines he knows are his morning and evening pills, and his daily marathon of working out. Having missed the past few years of life, he desperately seeks something solid to hold on to, but must maintain a façade of calm because nobody else seems fazed by the information that astounds him on regular basis. While his friends and family are supportive of him as he attempts to return to the real world, they also barrage him with their own expectations of life and how he is supposed to behave, making his transition more complicated and burying his expectations beneath those of his friends and family. Written as a collection of journal entries to serve as his both his memoir and proof that he is improving his life, “Silver Linings Playbook” documents the naïveté of happy endings, but also shows that endings only bring more beginnings.

I absolutely loved the "Silver Linings Playbook" movie, and I think this is the first time I would pick the movie over the book (I'm going to blame this on the fact that I saw the movie first). The book is fairly simply written since it is written to sound like a journal. While this is good for embracing the child-like innocence/emerging into new adulthood that the main character has, I felt it wasn't quite substantial enough. It is a quick read, and very entertaining, but there is a lot of potential to expand the novel, add depth to characters and situations, and explore how mental illness manifests in the 21st century and how others react to that. I did like how the novel was a bit ambiguous about the reality of silver linings - that ending was a bit more satisfying than the hollywood ending the movie has. This was a really fun book, but if you absolutely had to pick one or the other, I would go with the move.